Abstract
The mechanical properties of tendon play a fundamental role to passively transmit forces from muscle to bone, withstand sudden stretches, and act as a mechanical buffer allowing the muscle to work more efficiently. The use of non-invasive imaging methods for the assessment of human tendon's mechanical, structural, and biochemical properties in vivo is relatively young in sports medicine, clinical practice, and basic science. Non-invasive assessment of the tendon properties may enhance the diagnosis of tendon injury and the characterization of recovery treatments. While ultrasonographic imaging is the most popular tool to assess the tendon's structural and indirectly, mechanical properties, ultrasonographic elastography, and ultra-high field magnetic resonance imaging (UHF MRI) have recently emerged as potentially powerful techniques to explore tendon tissues. This paper highlights some methodological cautions associated with conventional ultrasonography and perspectives for in vivo human Achilles tendon assessment using ultrasonographic elastography and UHF MRI.
Highlights
Alexandre Fouré *Reviewed by: Lauri Stenroth, University of Eastern Finland, Finland Olivier Seynnes, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, Norway
The mechanical properties of tendon are highly involved in muscle tension transmission to the skeleton and in the storage-recoil process of elastic potential energy (Alexander and Bennet-Clark, 1977; Roberts et al, 1997) playing an important role in daily activities and sport practices
Most of the published studies chose arbitrary values for tendon cross sectional area (CSA) and slack length (Maganaris, 2002; Magnusson et al, 2003b; Arya and Kulig, 2010) when it is well known that the Achilles tendon slack length does not correspond to the tendon length when the ankle joint angle is at 90◦ (Nordez et al, 2010; Hug et al, 2013) and that CSA is not homogeneous along the tendon (Bohm et al, 2015; Lenskjold et al, 2015)
Summary
Reviewed by: Lauri Stenroth, University of Eastern Finland, Finland Olivier Seynnes, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, Norway. The use of non-invasive imaging methods for the assessment of human tendon’s mechanical, structural, and biochemical properties in vivo is relatively young in sports medicine, clinical practice, and basic science. Non-invasive assessment of the tendon properties may enhance the diagnosis of tendon injury and the characterization of recovery treatments. While ultrasonographic imaging is the most popular tool to assess the tendon’s structural and indirectly, mechanical properties, ultrasonographic elastography, and ultra-high field magnetic resonance imaging (UHF MRI) have recently emerged as potentially powerful techniques to explore tendon tissues.
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